Creating and editing knols. An overview of how to get text into your knol and some basic editing and publishing techniques.

Google recently announced Knol, a new experimental website that puts information online in a way that encourages authorial attribution. Unlike articles for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which anyone is free to revise, Knol articles will have individual authors, whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their work. Currently, participation in the project is by invitation only, but Google will eventually open up Knol to the public. At that point, a given topic may end up with multiple articles by different authors. Readers will be able to rate the articles, and the better an article's rating, the higher it will rank in Google's search results.

Modern knowledge management is all about herding cats. Ever tried telling a cat what to do? Even “kitty, kitty, kitty” calls are pretty ineffective. A bowl of milk is better. Google’s recently released Knol service shows that they understand this.

Google has surely noticed that much of its search traffic is directed to Wikipedia, which regularly has an entry in the top five search results for any particular term. If Google could steer all that traffic toward its own properties instead, and if those properties contained Google ads, and if Google split its revenue with the article creators... well, it's not hard to see why this would start to look pretty good to both Google and content creators, and why such an initiative could ramp up quickly.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is testing a new Web service intended to become a repository of knowledge from experts on various topics, one that could turn into a competitor to Wikipedia and other sites.

Move over Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, and Squidoo. Maybe. That's because Google's testing its own service to let people build a repository of knowledge. In fact, knowledge forms the core of the service's name: Google Knol.

In some strange, twisted sort of a way, Google’s foray into social content, aka Knols, is a tip of the hat to entities whose results have started to show up really high in the search results — Wikipedia and Mahalo, for example. Mathew Ingram points out this can hurt not only them, but others as well. It is also a sign that Google (GOOG) is finally beginning to show its monopolist claws.

News broke late yesterday that Google was preparing to launch a new site call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo to create a new user generated authoritative online knowledgebase of everything.

So, with that in mind, here’s what you should do right away if/when Google Knol launches:

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.